In their team’s 120-113 loss to the Dallas Mavericks on Monday night, Memphis Grizzlies sidekicks turned co-stars Desmond Bane and Jaren Jackson Jr. combined for 69 points. The only teammate to join them in double figures was Vince Williams Jr., who got to 10 on a scrambled play 3-pointer with less than a minute to play in a game that was already well-decided.

It was a too familiar sight for the Grizzlies this season, the fourth time Bane and Jackson have combined for 60 or more in a loss. Both players are averaging career highs in scoring while the team’s offense has flirted with dead last in the league.

It wasn’t too late to deploy a Ja Morant Return Countdown Clock inside the arena. When the buzzer sounded, my estimate put that proposed clock at 189.5 hours — and counting! At 6-16, the Grizzlies can only hope Morant’s impending return won’t now come too late to compete for a postseason berth. 

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Jackson’s offense, per usual, has been more erratic than Bane’s, who’s shown up every night. Even Bane’s lone single-digit scoring game this season came on an injured foot with a career-high 10 assists.

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For this first quarter of the NBA season, Bane has offered a pretty good solution to the riddle: By maintaining his already rarefied effectiveness against a much higher degree of difficulty.

Bane’s always excellent shooting hasn’t gotten better. What’s impressive is that it hasn’t gotten much worse as he’s faced more defensive attention and had to hunt, hungrily, to create shots within an offense with few other places to turn.

Asked back in early October, on the eve of training camp, what his developmental focus had been during the summer, Bane gave a perhaps unexpected answer: “cardio.”

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With Morant set to miss 25 games, Bane wanted to emerge as an “elite two-way guard,” getting “to that level where I can do it on the ball and off the ball and on the defensive end as well.”

That cardio has come in handy. With Morant’s absence compounded by backcourt absences to Marcus Smart and Luke Kennard, Bane’s logged more than 34 minutes a night without missing a game, taking nearly 20 shots a game and “using” nearly 30% of the team’s possessions. He’s averaged 25 points and five assists overall, 30 and six in wins. That usage rate isn’t quite at the level of Morant or other top scoring point guards, but is about the same this season as the likes of LeBron James and Jayson Tatum. 

And despite all that, Bane hasn’t abandoned the defensive end, his block and steal rates both up this season. 

A three-level scorer

Few have followed Bane’s development closer than teammate fellow 2020 draftee Xavier Tillman Sr. 

“His growth, as far as his basketball career and on-court ability, has been amazing,” Tillman said at the team’s shootaround on Monday. “Coming in our rookie year (he was just) a spot-up shooter. Then in year two and three, he’s putting the ball down a little bit and finishing at the rim as well, to where now he’s scoring at all three levels. He’s stopping on a dime and hitting those elbow mid-range jump shots.”

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While the catch-and-shoot corner 3-pointers that garnered Bane the nickname “Fly-By King” early in his career have become less common as he’s spent more time on the ball, Bane has indeed rounded into a complete scorer. 

He now owns the middle of the floor, raining above-the-break 3s and rumbling to the rim while in-between sprinkling in pull-up mid-range jumpers and floaters.

This was all on display last week during Bane’s career-high 49-point night in Detroit. 

After missing his first three shots, Bane made 19 of 28.

His four 3-pointers included catch-and-shoot, pull-up and step-back varieties, the full menu.

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He peppered the Pistons with more than half a dozen mid-range pull ups.

And he got going to the rack, with seemingly reckless headlong rim-runs in transition and crafty finishes in the halfcourt, lowering a shoulder to dislodge rookie Ausar Thompson in the lane and finishing with a finger roll or using his off arm to shield muscular center Jalen Duren and angling a sweeping layup over Duren’s pterodactyl reach.

Despite Tillman’s citation of the mid-range, a shot Bane is taking more this season as the team’s first option, it’s been Bane’s career-best 67% finishing at the rim that’s perhaps been most impressive.

The erstwhile Fly-By King is these days more often Downhill Des.

The notoriously short-armed Bane doesn’t have length or off-the-floor explosiveness to rely on. But he does have quick feet and a rock-solid frame. Those attributes have partnered to forge a locomotive style that attacks with force. (“Force = mass times acceleration,” as you may remember from high school physics.) And he’s honed his feel for finding the net at the terminus of these attacks.

The hard way

Beyond some slight shifts, Bane’s shot profile hasn’t changed much. His shot diet has: He’s eating more, and the extra bites are all a little bit tougher.

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You can see this here and there in the numbers. Without Morant and, crucially, I think, Steven Adams, to set him up, Bane’s having to get his own like never before. 

Bane’s percentage of assisted 3-pointers has dropped about 10% each season, and again in this one. But his percentage of assisted shots at the rim has plummeted, from above 50% to closer to 30%. Overall, for the first time in his career, more of Bane’s baskets have been self-created than assisted. 

Per NBA tracking data, he’s shooting a little more frequently “very late” in shot clocks and a little more frequently against “very tight” defense. His percentage of shots taken after having the ball for six seconds or more — an eternity in a 24-second shot-clock game — has more than doubled this season. 

You think you’ve seen Bane racing around with the ball, just trying to find cracks of daylight to get off a shot? You have. 

And yet, Bane’s effective field-goal percentage has dropped only slightly, mostly due to 3-point shooting that’s dropped below 40% for the first time. Three-point shooting varies, but this time I think that’s a degree-of-difficulty dip.

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If that all weren’t enough, Bane has now led the Grizzlies in assists in nine of the past 10 games. 

Bane isn’t technically playing point guard. Let’s call his position something else: The offense. 

“Now the facilitating is a whole different part,” said Tillman. “He knows that people are double-teaming him and triple-teaming him and he’s finding open guys and trusting guys to hit shots, and it’s only going to pay off for us as a team.” 

To put Bane’s offensive play this season in perspective, using stats from Cleaning the Glass, a site that filters out “garbage time,” there are only nine players who have topped Bane this year in usage (how much you do), points per shot attempt (how efficiently you score) and assist percentage (who much you set up teammates). 

It’s similar to the MVP contenders list: Nikola Jokic, Luka Doncic, Joel Embiid, Devin Booker, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Kevin Durant, Tyrese Haliburton, Damian Lillard and James.

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There are some split decisions among others in this usage-rate range. Point guards Trae Young and De’Aaron Fox assist more but have been less efficient. MVP contenders Tatum, Stephen Curry and Giannis Antetokounmpo get their own better but with lower assist percentages.

Some star players — Anthony Edwards, Donovan Mitchell — trail Bane by both measures.

Bane has arguably been among the 15 or so best offensive players in the NBA, on a team so bereft of other outlets that it’s still ranked 28th on offense.

Bane’s inability to single-handedly lift the team suggests, in part, that he’s a second-option thrust into the lead role due to Morant’s absence. But even more it highlights the wreckage around him, not only with the absence of Morant but Adams, Smart, Kennard, Brandon Clarke … 

The Grizzlies offense has been pretty bad even with Bane on the court. Without him? You’d have to go back a decade to a Philadelphia 76ers team that went 10-72 to find a full-season offense as bad as these Grizzlies with Bane on the bench. 

Help is on the way

Bane has carried a mighty burden to start this season, but help is finally on the way. 

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There will be some challenges as Morant is reintegrated into a team where Bane has had both hands on the wheel. 

Can Morant’s return boost Bane’s effectiveness without taking away too much opportunity? And can it also work the other way, this new, deeper Desmond Bane helping to elevate Morant?

These complications are nothing compared to the obvious boost this reconstituted backcourt can give the Grizzlies this season and, perhaps more importantly, beyond.

“It’s going to make it a lot easier for the team and for Ja as well,” said Tillman. “Now, if Ja has any slumps or is fatigued during the game, he can have the confidence that Des can get the job done.” 

There’s clear “best backcourt in basketball” potential here. Unlocking that with a hopefully restored Morant and a greater-capacity Bane will be what much of the rest of this season will be about, to set up the competitive near future even if the competitive present drifts away. 

It’s a tantalizing prospect, but will wait a little while longer. 

Bane has to carry the weight for three more games. Win or lose, and it’s been more the latter, it’s been an effort to appreciate.